Cut Up September

If there’s one thing Uncle Bill taught us, it’s to never number pages.

a shrinking device and a shirt pocket will make me warmer. so many hearts undocumented, unheard by my alien recording devices ever hunting for a human who purrs. .

Orange striped cat lying dead in the road, a ring of bowed heads willing life back into limp unrolled tongue. Woman in a doorway grateful it wasn’t her dog, waiting on the lawsuit. Pick up the cat Amanda, pick it up. This is important. You’ll remember this. Instead I keep staring. Some wonder crone finally stops and doesn’t blink just scoops and carries cat to a more peaceful traffic-free aria though it’s already ended.

This memory strong in my mind biking home I slam on the brakes at the site of flattened crow and peal body from the road for tree lawn decomposing while the dead’s friends look on, remembering.

We might not be dead at 30 like the pilgrims but we might as well be, sitting in our living rooms bitching between hotdog bites and commercial breaks about politicians and their decision making before returning to our regularly scheduled nothing-better-to-do, laughing at Asian teenagers falling off flotation devices into blue-dyed swimming pools while wearing helmets and throwing up both thumbs to an army of white-man cameras.

It’s to convince the most serial killer self that underneath the bullshit core there’s a miner 49 just waiting to strap on a hat and suit and stumble into the mine even before the canary’s come back.

hand on thigh circles a birthmark threatening my theory of being spawned while the sun sets fast and I worry of winter. me pretending to look at passersby with their tiny white socks and duck shoes and khaki shorts while thinking about your hand, full poetry on display protruding veins I want to strum. eyes slide to the left and craft your profile onto my coin, hammered hard by life’s frustration but still sneaky enough to smirk. knuckle in mouth channels fake concentration while half-closed lids plot plans for my own hand that could end in arrest if I’m not careful. I adjust my leg to accommodate other parts of you imagined traveling softest hidden skin, drinking deep every finger curve crease line fingertip sun scorched wrist, and it’s the wrist where the rings of my own fingers click and coax your hand a naked inch higher.

In Portland things in a pink box are always donuts.

and someone is yelling at me through the phone about how you should be married by now with all this love in your face you ingrate, and I say which face on what head? and he says all of them and I hadn’t considered that.

you don’t notice how my prehistoric hands sculpt a keyboard or how important cuddle dissolve is to my ever-wrestled wrangling.

No: I’m a one-eyed liar blind to my thousand tricks trapping bodies in barbed wire until even intestines entangle. Even my open is pin from grenade. My only recipe blows up the room.